We Have The Answer To ‘Interstellar’s’ Biggest Question

***WARNING! MASSIVE SPOILERS FOR INTERSTELLAR AHEAD!***

If you saw Interstellar over the weekend, you probably have a lot of questions. These may include, “Can you survive falling through a black hole?” “What was Dr. Mann’s plan once he got off that alien planet?” and “Is anyone going to comment on how Renesmee Cullen from Twilight: Breaking Dawn is playing Matthew McConaughey‘s daughter?!?!”

However, there is one big, burning question that has kept us guessing all weekend long. “How is Anne Hathaway supposed to be able to raise all those babies in space by herself?”

Let’s back up. In Interstellar, we are told that our heroes are traveling through a wormhole to the opposite side of the universe to find a new home for humans. There are a number of possible planets that could support life. So, Cooper (McConaughey), Brand (Hathaway), Seneca Crane from The Hunger Games (aka Wes Bentley) and a nice, smart black scientist (played by David Gyasi) must suss out which planet we can make our new home, and hopefully settle there. Plan A includes Michael Caine figuring out a gravity equation on Earth that would allow humans the power to travel back and forth easily across the universe, and Plan B is incubating a bunch of diverse embryos and resetting the human race on a brave new world.

Plan B makes a lot of sense until you realize that it doesn’t make a lot of sense.

I may not be a scientist, but I am a 29-year-old woman. Which means I have given a lot of thought to when, if, and how I would start a family. Raising one baby with the support of a loving partner and a fully-flourishing community is hard work. It’s so hard, that I find the very idea of giving birth to a baby and taking care of it absolutely terrifying. So, imagine my horror when I realized that at the end of Interstellar, Anne Hathaway is tasked with raising hundreds of newborns on a distant world all by herself. Oh, and she also has to build a sustainable human colony at the same time.

I realize that at the end of the movie Cooper is abandoning his own dying daughter, and all her descendants, to race back to Brand and help her foster a new human race. I also realize that Jessica Chastain’s character figures out the gravity equation and everyone on Earth is saved. However, at some point, Brand’s character has to operate under the assumption that it’s up to her to raise a new human race. And at some point, NASA’s best case scenario would have been giving four or five people the task of raising hundreds of space babies alone. That plan is not just unreasonable; it’s ridiculous.

And so, I spent the entire weekend trying to figure out how this made sense to a group of brilliant NASA scientists. Here’s what I came up with:

Step 1: Brand sets up a self-sustaining colony.

Step 2: Presuming that these embryos will gesticulate in synthetic wombs — and Brand wasn’t also expected to carry each new human (yikes!) — Brand incubates two babies. Two babies. That’s tough, but manageable.

Step 3: Brand goes into cryogenic sleep for roughly 8 months. She wakes up, monitors, and delivers the two babies.

Step 4: She raises the babies until they are potty-trained, and then incubates the next two.

Step 5: She does NOT go into cryogenic sleep ever again because these children need to be watched at all times. Occasionally, when she needs “me time,” she puts the kids in cryogenic sleep.

Step 6: She delivers the next two babies. Hopefully, there are no complications. Also, let’s hope that there aren’t any weird flu viruses on this new alien world that have already killed Brand or the first two kids.

Step 7: At this point, if she’s lucky, she’s got two four-year-olds and two newborns. That’s tricky, but she can distract the four-year-olds with computer programs designed to give them a kindergarten education while she feeds, burps, and changes the diapers on the other two.

Step 8: She raises the babies until they are potty-trained, and then incubates the next two.

Step 9: At this point, the two oldest should be eight years old. That means they can be way more helpful. As time pushes on, she will be able to incubate more babies using the Duggar Family’s patented “buddy system” of managing multiple kids. Now the older kids can help raise the younger kids. Things spiral out from there. Within 25 years, you’ve got a generation of new space people who are ready to bump, grind, and populate the new world. The only problem? It’s hard for them to hook up because most of them feel like their siblings.

Step 10: At some point, Matthew McConaughey shows up and tries to bone Anne Hathaway. He spends more time looking at the sky than listening to the kids talk about the emotional trauma of being laboratory experiments who will never know their birth parents.

And that’s it! I figure that she can’t cheat time and put them all in cryogenic sleep because they won’t age that way, and even if they did, they would emerge from those plastic bag water pod beds as adults with the mental knowledge of newborns. I also realize she could go “full Duggar” and do one baby every year, but that seems a bit more stressful. In my mind getting two babies, hopefully a boy and a girl, out of their toddler years before bracing for it all over again makes more sense. In my mind, this is the only way I can believe it will work.

Unless, of course, this idea can’t work because Interstellar is a work of complete and utter fiction.